In the summer of 1988 the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London put on a two-week season of dance pieces by young choreographers. One of these was Spitfire, by the then unknown Matthew Bourne, which dressed its four male performers (one of them the 28-year-old choreographer) in Y-fronts and vests, and had them assume a series of heroic poses. The piece, in which the erotic fought a losing battle with the downright silly, drew on the imagery of the Littlewoods catalogue to create a tongue-in-cheek homage to the ballets of the Romantic era and their fragrant all-female groupings. Spitfire was a work in miniature, but it displayed all the important Bourne tropes: gender reversal, ballet-historical jokes and the ironic objectivisation of the male form.

Of course, Bourne has since become this country's most popular choreographer, and when the curtain rose on his feverishly-anticipated Dorian Gray in Edinburgh last week, my thoughts flew back to that evening at the ICA. The new piece, an updating of Oscar Wilde's 1891 Gothic novel, tells of the rise and fall of a beautiful, psychopathic male model. You see Dorian, in bed, and hear his alarm go off. It plays a tinny version of the overture to The Sleeping Beauty – a classic Bourne gag – and our anti hero rises dazedly to his feet in a pair of form-fitting white briefs.

They're there in the Dorian Gray poster, these briefs, lazily circling title role dancer Richard Winsor's hips beneath a pair of low-riding jeans. The show is nominally a moral cautionary tale, but that flash of peel-me-down-and-fuck-me elastic, the signature detail of the 21st-century metro-stud, tells us that Bourne's in a deeper groove. That he's still asking he same question that he asked in Spitfire, 20 years ago, and has returned to with varying degrees of insistence ever since: what does it mean, in this postmodern, post-heroic age, to be a man?

We follow Dorian to a job as a waiter servicing a function at some glossily vacant intersection of the art and fashion worlds. He's polite, but up for anything, and already looks overdressed in his suit. He's spotted by Basil Hallward (Aaron Sillis), a predatory photographer whose moves are based on David Hemmings's in Antonioni's Blow-Up (although, mysteriously, he's not allowed a motordrive camera), and the two are soon stalking each other like cats preparatory to a bout of narcissistic, Stolichnaya-fuelled sex. Set to a jagged score by Terry Davies, it's the first of many such liaisons. Wilde used the phrase 'feasting with panthers' to describe his exchanges with rent-boys, but in conjunction with Davies's music the loveless writhing often inclines more to the Raymond Revuebar end of the erotic spectrum. Over the evening this grinds us down, as it does Dorian himself.

His recompense, once he has been made over by Michela Meazza's Lady H, a vampiric manipulator in the mould of Nicky Hambleton-Jones of Channel 4's 10 Years Younger, is to see himself on a giant hoarding as the face of a fragrance called Immortal – Pour Homme. With his boot-camp haircut and sulkily suggestive gaze, Winsor strikes exactly the right note. But by now Dorian's a hopeless attention junkie, living only for the desire in others' eyes. He seduces a ballet dancer called Cyril Vane (Christopher Marney) but, discovering Vane to be as self-absorbed as he is himself, watches unmoved as he dies of a drug overdose. Other increasingly vicious killings follow, and Dorian's hubristic world begins to implode.

Overall, the narrative is tight and fast-moving, even if the Cyril Vane sequence is a little too self-referential for comfort. That the ballet star is introduced in a whirl of Prokofiev music and expires in the same attitude as Juliet in Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet suggests that the passage may be an encrypted homage to the late choreographer. Certainly nothing is accidental in a Bourne work. The plaster- cast head of Nijinsky as The Faun which decorates Dorian's flat refers not only to the sexual voyeurism in the 1912 ballet L'après-midi d'un faune, but to Nijinsky's real-life schizophrenia – a pathology underlined when, in a classic Gothic story-twist, Dorian begins to be stalked by his own double.

The Nijinsky cast is one of designer Lez Brotherston's gentler decorative touches. As Dorian's life grows bloodier and more chaotic, his flat fills with increasingly dark artworks: a blinded photo-portrait of himself, paintings of screaming heads and flayed meat by Francis Bacon and dismemberment scenes by Goya. By the end, in a tableau reminiscent of Killing for Company, Brian Masters's evocation of the Dennis Nils en murders, the place is dominated by the bleeding, life-size corpses of the Chapman brothers' sculpture Great Deeds Against the Dead.

Early reviews of Dorian Gray have been equivocal, taking particular aim at the slightness of Bourne's choreography. For me, the shallowness and the clichés are the point . Vanity is an unrelenting and paranoid business, as Winsor's performance makes eloquently clear. Sillis's Basil is another finely poised creation, all smirk and leather trousers when the going's good but spineless when the wind changes. And Meazza's reptilian Lady H embodies an entire caste of glib, over groomed arbiters of taste and behaviours. The power of the piece is in its contempt for this glittering surface-film so relentlessly forced on us by the mass media. Of course Bourne's choreographic language is trashy and cheap – that's his point, and there will be no shortage of people ready to share and embrace it.

Dorian Gray takes us into very dark territory, but the spectacle is never less than theatrical, and I suspect that Bourne's huge and diverse audience will happily follow him to hell and back. Sitting next to me in Edinburgh was a writer from Tokyo, on the other side a voluble group from Glasgow, behind me a party including the colonel of the Irish Guards. The process of inquiry continues, and the results continue to fascinate.

· Dorian Gray runs from Tuesday to 14 Sept at Sadler's Wells, London EC1, then touring to Norwich and Newcastle

I thought it was exhilarating. I see quite a lot of theatre and dance - I saw Matthew Bourne's The Car Man in Manchester - but this was just fantastic.

Jenny Peebles, 23, festival assistant

I prefer more dance and less dramatic scene-shifting - but that's not a criticism of the piece itself. The set was quite effective, but if you didn't know the story I'm not sure you would get the significance of quite a lot of it.

Hamish Mcbride, 62, retired doctor

I thought it was lovely; the music was excellent. The story is very apposite to our own times, when there is so much celebrity culture around us. I loved it.

Malize Mcbride, 61, artist

It was much better than I expected. I haven't seen any Matthew Bourne before but I thought it was very powerful and very slick. No momentum was lost and the staging was very clever.

Adrian Tutt, 27, student

The way they approached the story was really good but I thought the contemporary dance lacked oomph - the dancers were sometimes disconnected from the storyline. It just lacked a bit of life.